James McGovern is an industry thought leader whose focus is on the human aspects of technology around open source, SOA, software security, enterprise architecture and agile software development.

The opinions expressed herein may or may not represent my own personal opinions and definitively do not represent my employer's view in any way...

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

2010: State of Enterprise IT

As we close out this year, let's take time to reflect on the state of Enterprise IT...

When compared to twenty years ago:

Developers no longer buy books in order to improve their craft and instead look for tactical answers via Google.

CIOs don't believe that sending developers for training is important and instead prefer for them to learn while writing production enterprise applications.

We have learned that there are better ways to develop software, yet somehow we always find ourselves returning to waterfall.

We have more PMP-certified project managers than any other point in history yet IT projects still continue to be late, over budget and/or of poor quality

We actually encourage the masses of IT employees to not know anything about code or other technical topics. In fact, not knowing IT helps one's career thrive.

There are more people in IT simply because it pays well and not because they are personally interested

Information systems continue to get breached. Instead of teaching developers of enterprise applications how to write secure code, we prefer to have auditors with accounting backgrounds run around with checklists hoping to improve security

Our desks are much cleaner, thanks to auditors who find it more important that we have a clean desk policy and that our number two pencils are sharpened rather than ensuring that people have the right competencies at each stage of the SDLC

We can't even get agreement on how applications should work with our infrastructure and constantly haggle with the guys downstairs yet we think that offshoring nine timezones away will result in a better outcome

We have a lot more people with the title of Architect but few of them actually know anything about architecture. They all happen to be really good at Powerpoint though.

We have a process for almost everything and if we don't, we have a metaprocess for creating future processes.

Our data centers are filled with lots of servers. In some shops, there are more servers than employees.

IBM used to be top consulting dog but are now being displaced by the likes of Accenture, a firm that is best known for suing its parent.

We used to be able to write enterprise applications that needed no more than 64mb of RAM. Nowadays, a developer can't write Hello World with less than 2gb of RAM on his desktop and still begs for more.

We can outsource critical business processes around the world, but most IT employees still aren't permitted to work from home.

The best amongst us can make a successful career in working with vendor partners and offshore development shops in translating English to English.

We have a lot more VP-level positions yet the vast majority can't approve buying lunch for their team without a higher level signature.

You used to know a lot about your coworkers. Today, you can barely pronounce their last names.

There are hundreds of viable alternatives to expensive commercial software available from the open source community yet we still won't consider. After all, we depend on those vendors for their lovely Powerpoint and coffee mugs.

At least ten years ago, we could count on Infoworld being the authoritative source for the practice known as Management by Magazine. Today, at best IT direction is expressed in incoherent tweets by short-form conversationalists.

You get paid more, work longer hours but otherwise deliver less.

Let's not forget our love of documentation. We have more sharepoint sites than employees. We even have more process around publishing documentation than we do in putting source code into production.

IT continues to prove its incompetence yet the business continues to pay the bill. I wonder if we are more aligned than anyone realizes...